With the current state of society in the United States and the increased discussions around social justice in education, the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE) takes an extraordinarily relevant and important stance on equity in mathematics education. According to the AMTE Position on Equity in Mathematics Teacher Education (2015), mathematics teachers and mathematics teacher educators should “recognize, challenge, and ultimately transform structures and systems of inequity that lead to inequity in mathematics learning and teaching based on race, culture, class, gender, sexual orientation, language, religion, and dis/ability in mathematics education” (p. 1). In ultimately transforming systems of inequity in mathematics education, mathematics teachers should adopt pedagogical approaches that are culturally relevant and focused on social justice to provide opportunities for students “to learn mathematics in ways that are deeply meaning and influential to the development of a positive mathematics identity” (Buell & Shulman, 2019, pg. 206). According to Buell and Shulman, these practices require preservice and practicing mathematics teachers to plan for the nuances and complexities inherent in the concepts of culture and social justice during mathematics instruction.
Teachers and preservice teachers begin to know the culture and the context of where their students live when they engage in activities within the community that surrounds and supports their students outside of the classroom. By participating in community walks, service learning, and book studies, teachers and teacher candidates begin to connect stakeholders at all levels in mathematical learning experiences, aiming to positively impact students’ mathematical identities and improve mathematical learning via application for social action (Leonard & Evans, 2018). We have incorporated these practices into elementary and middle grades mathematics methods courses for preservice teachers, encouraging the power of community as they are learning with and from each other in teacher preparation programs. In developing this community, preservice teachers and beginning teachers continued to meet as they graduated their programs and became first-year K-8 mathematics teachers, sustaining this community for continual support and encouragement from one another. This article details this community-centered approach.
Community Walks: Learning from Stakeholders Outside of the School Community
Preparing preservice and beginning K-8 mathematics teachers to understand their students and surrounding communities requires active participation in community events and investment in relationships with parents and families as major stakeholders in the success of their students’ education. We propose that an understanding of the community and a promotion of activism toward change values social justice-oriented mathematics lessons that help students view mathematics as a tool to understand inequities and social problems in the world. Research has previously shown that children benefit from mathematics instruction that builds on their community-based knowledge (Civil & Kahn, 2001). However, a first step is required for preservice and beginning teachers to understand how to make these mathematics lessons meaningful (Bartell et al., 2017). In our teacher preparation programs, preservice and beginning K-8 teachers must learn to understand the communities where their own students experience life in the immediate surroundings of their schools. Thus, we propose a community-oriented model that actively engages teachers in meeting and knowing their community through a community walk. Community walks for mathematics classrooms involve visiting at least two different community settings, looking for and discussing mathematical evidence, and coming up with questions about the contexts that could be investigated mathematically (Bartell et al., 2017). These community walks aim to develop relationships between teachers and their students’ parents and families as stakeholders who have a direct influence in the mathematical success and overall well-being of their students.
Establishing relationships within the community builds the foundation to create opportunities for active learning that open the door for mathematical learning experiences in out-of-school contexts, in addition to mathematics lessons in the classroom. However, these relationships must first be built by simple but purposeful active engagement with the community itself. We have experienced great success with community involvement that focuses on building knowledge through community walks. In these community walks, teacher educators, preservice teachers, and members of the K-12 schools walk around the school and surrounding community, and simply get to know each other while actively discussing the very locations and contexts where they are walking. In one example of a community walk, a preservice teacher walked around the school with the families of her students. They focused their discussions on topics that the families found most important about the school and their children’s education, including perceptions of the school. This led to the preservice teacher’s development of a lesson that gathered data about the school and community around them, which turned into an entire mathematics unit on organizing and presenting data about the crime rates in the area and calculating statistics to compare the crime rates to other regions across the state. In another community walk, the preservice teacher walked with her university educator to notable places in the community, including a barber shop and a local restaurant. This community walk challenged the preservice teacher to create mathematics lessons based on these places, so the preservice teacher developed two different units for these locations. One centered around mapping and calculating distance between two points on a map, and the other calculated costs for the supplies and ingredients to operate the restaurant for a day.
Personalized mathematics lessons that come from within the community foster a sense of belonging to the same community and a common desire to know one another. This allows all stakeholders to come to the table together in partnership for the value and purpose of promoting positive mathematics learning experiences. Results of these community walks are multi-layered. Teachers and preservice teacher have stronger relationships with students and their families. Given the familiarity and investment in the community, they can also begin to brainstorm ideas to involve themselves in additional community events, especially informal mathematics learning experiences such as family mathematics and STEM nights, as well as afterschool mathematics clubs. Finally, community walks open the door for students and teachers to directly discuss inequities or other issues within the community around them that can inform and inspire mathematics lessons centered on social justice in a local context.
Service Learning: Empowering Students with Social Justice Mathematics
With an eye specifically on preservice and beginning teachers, we propose this model for service-learning experiences within the framework of an undergraduate teacher preparation program and experiences that promote growth in preservice teachers’ practices in the classroom. By volunteering at family and community events, especially ones that promote positive mathematics learning beyond the classroom such as family mathematics or STEM nights and after-school mathematics clubs, preservice teachers see the value in promotion of positive mathematics learning for both students and parents, particularly for students in underrepresented and marginalized populations. In our experiences, preservice teachers’ reflections on these practices see that community-based mathematics and STEM programs for underrepresented minority students in urban settings can develop a STEM identity. Their students experience a transition in mindset from mathematics being too hard to mathematics being tangible and powerful and a means of changing inequities, even within their own communities. Students understand that the members of their community support them in learning and achieving their educational goals in culturally relevant ways (Leonard & Evans, 2018). One example of a STEM night activity we have seen is maximizing the space for a garden at the school to contribute to meals provided for students eligible for free and reduced lunches. Another example helped students use data from different local grocery stores to analyze the costs and availability of healthy foods, particularly in relation to different areas of town based on wealth. As seen in these two examples, teacher preparation programs should foster positive mathematics experiences for underrepresented student populations by creating mathematics lessons through a social justice lens so that students view mathematics and statistics as social tools to understand inequities and make a difference (Unfried & Canner, 2019).
We have seen that preservice teachers can and will create mathematics lessons that promote social justice because they recognize the positive impacts and relevance of these lessons on students’ mathematical learning and identities as citizens in local and broader communities. Students realize that they have the power and knowledge to identify inequities and systemic injustices, define and solve problems using mathematics as evidentiary support, and actively take steps toward creating change. By actively engaging students in mathematics learning that is personal and relevant in their own communities, preservice and practicing mathematics teachers alike promote student adoption of agency of their own mathematics learning (Buenrostro & Radinsky, 2019). Teachers create lessons and form relationships with their students and their families in out-of-school and informal spaces so that students make connections to applications for mathematics for social action.
Book Study Community: Learning with the School Community
Finally, we propose that teachers and preservice teachers continue in a community with each other and provide accountability for social justice teaching through book study or a book club. Research has shown that book clubs are valuable resources for teachers and preservice teachers to have a more relaxed and social environment for engaging with other teachers who, by structure of the book club, are on an equal level (Mensah, 2009). Our experiences with book clubs and teacher preparation programs involve the expectation that all participants adopt leadership of different sessions of the book club, so that authority is not assumed by any one member or leader. This helps maintain the equality of members as educators of mathematics and encourages teaching and learning for all teachers and preservice teachers in the club. Further, the book club allows for selection of books that encourages social justice from a practical standpoint in the classroom. These books inform preservice and beginning teachers of historical perspectives of inequities in mathematics education for underrepresented populations and support follow-up with practical lessons to enact within their own classrooms. Our teacher preparation programs have found great success in a book club model because of the practicality of leniency in an informal setting. Without the intimidating atmosphere of a professional development presentation or conference, preservice and beginning teachers feel more comfortable to discuss openly with one another and take advantage of the social aspect of fellowship with other similar preservice and beginning teachers.
In the initial year of the book club led by the first two authors, preservice and beginning teachers took turns leading a study on a chapter of the book “Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers.” It was important to create an environment where no one was considered above others, so that every teacher felt they could equally contribute and come to the table to bring up their own ideas, observations, troubles, and experiences as they read, analyzed, reflected, and implemented new social justice mathematics lessons in their classrooms. This book particularly gave the teachers many ideas for tangible lessons that explicated the ways in which the mathematics content could allow students to consider mathematical inequities found even in the surrounding communities. After one book study session, a teacher was inspired to replicate a similar lesson about estimation using geometric area. This led to an important discussion about the differences in Mercator vs. Peter’s map and the value of mathematics on worldview, as the students saw that sometimes people have incorrect perceptions of the size and thus the importance of different geographic regions. Other lessons from this book were very applicable to different teachers who taught various levels of mathematics, which were explored in-depth with the help of all teachers in the book study.
Further, through experience of our book study with mathematics teachers, we posit that the ability to learn with and from other educators of various experience levels, mathematics content, and geographical and socioeconomic locations is an invaluable tool to understanding mathematics in a humanized context with a focus on social justice mathematics. We recognize that not every teacher is in the same situation, but the book study atmosphere invites everyone to learn about the struggles and successes of implementing social justice-oriented mathematics in their own classrooms, while also providing suggestions for ways to implement new content or pedagogical practices in the future. It has been nothing but challenging and rewarding to have a first-year elementary mathematics teacher explicate the struggle of pushback that led to the success of students stating definitive steps toward change in their own households to make the world a more just place for people who do not have the same privileges that they do. With inspiration through a tangible example from someone within our own book study community, we are confident that we can create lessons for our own secondary or college students in similar social justice-oriented mathematics lessons.
Conclusion: Local Communities and Professional Learning Communities
Overall, we propose a model for teacher preparation programs that maintains the heart of community for the purpose of application of mathematics for social justice in local contexts. This design for programs encourages preservice teachers to first establish relationships with their students and the communities around them. Then, by building upon these foundational relationships, teachers can actively involve themselves in the community in ways that promote positive mathematical identity and encourage students to see the value of learning mathematics in class and in out-of-school and other informal contexts, helping students see mathematics learning beyond the walls of the classroom. Finally, a major component of programs that push community engagement into social action for mathematics teaching could be the utilization of a book club, where the setting seats everyone at the same figurative table so that they can dig deep into their own reflections and understandings of social justice mathematics. Preservice and beginning K-8 mathematics teachers experience community by both coming to know their local communities and learning from their own professional learning communities in the book study. As a result, the mathematics teachers learn how they can better approach social justice and implement actionable change in their teaching practices and create social justice-oriented mathematics lessons to empower their students to see mathematics and statistics as tools for social change.
References
Bartell, T., Turner, E., Aguirre, J., Drake, C., Foote, M., & Mcduffie, A. (2017). Connecting children’s mathematical thinking with family and community knowledge in mathematics instruction. Teaching Children Mathematics, 23(6), 326-328.
Buell, C. & Shulman, B. (2019). An introduction to mathematics for social justice. PRIMUS, 29(3-4), 205-209.
Buenrostro, P. & Radinsky, J. (2019). Looking at my (real) world through mathematics: Memories and imaginaries of math and science learning. Cognition and Instruction, 37(3), 390-407.
Civil, M. & Kahn, L. (2001). Mathematics instruction developed from a garden theme. Teaching Children Mathematics, 7, 400-405.
Leonard, J. & Evans, B. (2018). Revisiting the influence of math links: Building learning communities in urban settings. Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, 11(1-2), 142-151.
Mensah, F. (2009). Confronting assumptions, biases, and stereotypes in preservice teachers’ conceptualizations of science teaching through the use of book club. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 46(9), 1041-1066.
Position: Equity in Mathematics Teacher Education. Position: Equity in Mathematics Teacher Education A position paper of the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE). (2015, September). https://amte.net/sites/default/files/amte_equitypositionstatement_sept20....
Unfried, A. & Canner, J. (2019). Doing social justice: Turning talk into action in a mathematics service learning course, PRIMUS, 29(3-4), 210-227.